Rosen was a controversial figure almost from the dawn of his adulthood. Raised as an Orthodox Jew, he lost his faith as a young man. When his new wife Ceil, also Jewish, converted to Christianity, he quickly followed, and with marked zeal. He was 21, and from that point on his family disowned him.

Within four years Rosen was ordained as a Baptist minister, and went on to work for the American Board of Missions to the Jews. But his unconventional style and heavy-handed personality eventually caused him to part ways with the organization, and in 1973 he founded his own group, Jews for Jesus.

Jews for Jesus was a unique organization springing from a unique time. Influenced by and playing off of the hippie culture and protest era, the movement gained quick cultural inroads, converting many young Jews while simultaneously capturing the attention and imagination of the growing evangelical Christian movement. The group’s success incensed the Jewish community, and a deeply adversarial relationship between global Judaism and Jews for Jesus has existed for nearly four decades.

In a vitriolic editorial for The Jewish Journal, Rabbi Bentzion Kravitz outlines the arguments most Jews have with Jews for Jesus and its founder. In addition to accusing Rosen of needlessly aggresive methods, Kravitz also believes he and his organization have been deceptive in two major ways. First, “His most deceptive tactic promoted the notion that a Jew can be Jewish and Christian at the same time,” while also condemning Judaism in many instances. Second, he accuses Rosen of instructing missionaries to ignore basic theological tenets of Christianity (such as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ), when reaching out to Jews, so as to make proselytism easier. He concludes: “Rosen’s legacy will be that his deceptive tactics have become the accepted protocol in the Evangelical Christian movement. It is now second nature for church members to tell their Jewish friends, and Christian students to tell their peers, that they can be Jewish and Christian at the same time.”

Of course, from a Christian persective the irony in that statement is that the first Christians were Jews. Largely because of this simple fact many evangelical Christians do not see the tension that Rabbi Kravitz sees in being a “Jewish Christian,” or “Christian Jew.” Indeed, the first major controversy of the early church, recorded in the Book of Acts, was whether new gentile converts needed to become Jewish in order to practice Christianity. The “Judaizers,” as history has termed them, argued that gentiles should be circumcised and made to follow Talmudic Law if they were to follow Jesus. Theologically, since Christians are monotheistic and see the Trinity not as three gods but as three personae or manifestations of the single God, many Christians do not easily recognize the contradiction that Jews such as Kravitz see in being both Jewish and Christian at the same time.

Nevertheless, for most Jews, that contradiction is very real, as is the threat they feel from Jews for Jesus. For religious Jews and evangelical Christians alike, a continued and age-old lack of trust, understanding, and communication fuel this divide, and Moishe Rosen was a poster-child for the heated nature of this division.

It seems a given that Rosen was aggresive in his tactics and abbrasive in his relationships with others. As to whether he was right or not, well, suffice it to say that now he knows the answer better than any of us.